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Bloober Team's Layers of Fear gave you a 19th century mansion in a state of continual, terrible reassembly, its furnishings switching places behind your back, its rooms expanding and contracting like the chambers of a heart. Observer gives you an entire apartment block, lifted from contemporary Krakow and teleported into a cyberpunk dystopia unabashedly pilfered from Blade Runner. It, too, delights in how the familiar might be rendered horrible, with certain objects and layouts reappearing in ever more nightmarish guises as you progress through its seven hour plot, but it also casts its net a little wider, to encompass a world in which the digital has displaced and eroded the physical - a world that isn't so much the grim future as present-day neglect, alienation and torment fed through an amplifier. In Observer, surfaces don't merely shapeshift when out of view but fester visibly with computational ephemera, lines of green code crawling across doorframes and wallpaper, asserting the geometry of rooms, corridors and tunnels even where the brickwork beneath has rotted away.We've seen these kinds of ambient AR flourishes many times before, of course - Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Tom Clancy's The Division are two parallels that occur off the top of my head - and you could argue that Observer's portrayal is laboured, stagey: there's an overabundance of cathode-ray TVs displaying fizzy close-ups of twitching mouths and eyes, for example. But few games set in the overlap between digital and architectural space entwine their motifs as brilliantly, and if the surgery is messy, that's to the purpose. Observer is a game that makes what is essentially a building-wide wifi network feel profoundly unclean, like something you want to scrub off, hack out even as you make use of various invasive technologies to further the story.
As Bertie discovered earlier this year, one of the great surprises with Observer is that it's secretly a detective game. As Daniel Lazarski, an ageing snoop with a headful of forensic gadgetry, you travel to an apartment block to investigate a mysterious message from your estranged son. Shortly after you arrive, certain events trigger a lockdown, leaving Daniel to explore the cramped, winding structure, knocking on doors and picking over grisly crime scenes using two vision modes - one for analysis of mechanisms, the other for organic evidence such as blood spatter.
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